Tilt Shift Maker website

I’ve been trying all weekend to get to the TiltShiftMaker website to try it out but it seems they’ve been inundated by people wanting to try out their free service. I wanted to try it out for myself before posting about it so I tried this morning and got it to work – the service is extremely straightforward and simple, it just seems they’re struggling with the demand.

Below is a photograph of the old Green Point Stadium I took while on a helicopter flip around Cape Town and the coast. It’s being replaced by the new stadium built for the FIFA 2010 Word Cup to be held in South Africa – I’d like to take another flip around town when it’s finished and take a photo of it for comparison. [via Lifehacker]

Tilt-shifted photo of Green Point Stadium, Cape Town, South Africa

 

MySpace – making the web uglier

<Rant>

You know, back in the early days of the Internet people were left to their own devices and added scrolling marquees, flashing text and TONS of animated GIFs to their pages to “spruce” (sic) them up. And as the Internet became more popular among more people, others too, who weren’t that technically (?) minded, wanted their own space on the Internet too – along came blogging tools and websites offering easy ways to publish your own content online. 

Even though I’ve had various personal, company and group-related websites up since the mid-90′s I’ve only been active on the blogosphere for the past 3 months, and I’m glad I did a little bit of research before starting – especially when it comes to picking a blogging-tool.

I initially was going to go with my own provider’s blogging tool but I didn’t like the templates, features or usability. The same applied to Blogger and MySpace (and boy was I warned about MySpace). I really thought the early days of ugly websites were gone by about 2000 but it seems MySpace has provided a platform for people to create ugly sites again (like they did when they first created and releases MS FrontPage). I’ve been to about a dozen or so MySpace pages of various people I’ve wanted to see profiles of and I’ve yet to see a decent looking page on that platform other than (maybe, at  stretch) the MySpace home page.

So then I finally settled on WordPress.com and looking back, I’m very happy I did.

</Rant>

Advertising Failure – 101

How to fail at making an advertising campaign work, using the latest of technologies:

1. Pay a creative agency lots of $$$ to shoot a sequence of animals in the wild with an expensive new digital video camera.
2. Pay same agency lots of $$$ to add digital after effects and a music backing track.
3. Get a developer (or two) to setup a website for you with more information about your product you’re advertising.

   And now, for the failure part…

4. Forget to actually put content up on your website, even more than a week after the video was made live)!

If someone actually did their job, then this was where you were supposed to find out more about the new Samsung NV24HD.

[Not even if you use Samsung's website search for the product, do you find any information on it.]

A picture is worth a thousand words…

… or maybe a few lines of malicious code?

Yup, it appears that hackers will shortly be able to post pictures on various websites (probably targeting social networking sites) and lure unsuspecting victims to browse a page with the infected picture or GIFAR. This GIFAR (GIF and JAR) will be interpreted by the browser as a normal GIF and displayed but the Java Runtime on the user’s machine will extract and execute it as a JAR file.

At Black Hat, researchers will show attendees how to create the GIFAR while omitting a few key details to prevent it from being used immediately in any widespread attack. – SlashDot News

For more information on this read the article on InfoWorld’s website.

Tangled up in the World Wide Web

I remember back in the day, when we were first introduced to the Internet in South Africa in the early 90′s, things seemed so much simpler back then. You had a website (or a single page, if you were lucky) that you could put up for the world to see – well the world, back then being your friends and family who saw it on your PC screen, as it would take about a year to be indexed, if at all!

Well that was Web 1.0, today we’re bombarded with Web 2.0! Interacting with people, social networking, rich media – where do you start, where do you go? Nowdays you not only have to keep your website updated, but your blog, your professional networking profile and your social networking profile. Nevermind all the emails you have to wade through, and don’t get me even started on SPAM!

How do you communicate with people online? Before, it was just email. Then tools like PowWow and ICQ appeared and we had an easier and instant way of communicating with people all over the world. Add, audio, video teleconferencing and it’s like you’re there! Heck, even surgeons are training and consulting using these kinds of tools today! What will it be like 2 to 3 generations from now? Will we be born with microchips embedded in our brains, already linked up to the super highway (well, except for in SA where we’re still about 5 to 10 years behind everyone else)?